"To shoot poignant pictures we only need follow the path of our enthusiasm . I believe that this feeling is the universe's way of telling us that we are doing the right thing. The viewing public will always disagree over the intrinsic merits of a particular photograph, but no one can deny the enthusiasm that originally inspired us to capture and offer that image to others." - Timothy Allen

"If the man who paints only the tree, or flower, or other surface he sees before him were an artist, the king of artists would be the photographer. It is for the artist to do something beyond this." - James McNeill Whistler

"We all move on the fringes of eternity and are sometimes granted vistas through fabric of illusion. Many refuse to admit it: I feel a mystery exists. There are certain times, when, as on the whisper of the wind, there comes a clear and quiet realisation that there is indeed a presence in the world, a nonhuman entity that is not necessarily inhuman. My private glimpses of some ideal reality create a lasting mood that that has often been recalled in some of my photographs. . . the subtle change of light across a waterfall moved me as did a singular vista of a far-off mountain under a leaden sky. Others might well have not responded at all. Deep resonances of spirit exist, giving us glimpses of a reality far beyond our general appreciation, and knowledge. . . .no matter how many stars we see in a clear mountain sky, we now know that they are but a minuscule fragment of the total population of suns and planets in the billions of galaxies out there in the incomprehensible void.

The only things in my life that compatibly exist with this grand universe are the creative works of the human spirit.

I have often had a retrospective vision where everything in my past life seems to fall with significance into logical sequence. Intuition, suspicion, or confidence in new ventures; there is a strange strain within me when advantage is not taken of some situation, the immediacy of recognition of the rightness or wrongness of a mood, a response, a decision - they are so often valid that I am increasingly convinced that we have yet to grasp the reality of existence." - Ansel Adams

"I'm not a documentary photographer. You need "objectivity" to make documentary photographs. But how can you possess objectivity if you seek something, need something? As I walked the streets of Manhattan in the early 70's I'd say to myself, "What are you doing?" and I'd answer, "I'm documenting the city" which I realize now was both a stupid and hilarious answer. You can't document a city like New York. You can document your friends' lives or your neighborhood, but not the city. The city is an Idea, and the idea is pluralism, which always represents itself to consciousness, like democracy, as a constantly disappearing kind of beauty. Objectivity has nothing to do with it." - John Rosenthal

"You know you are seeing such a photograph if you say to yourself, "I could have taken that picture. I've seen such a scene before, but never like that." It is the kind of photography that relies for its strengths not on special equipment or effects but on the intensity of the photographer's seeing. It is the kind of photography in which the raw materials--light, space, and shape--are arranged in a meaningful and even universal way that gives grace to ordinary objects." - Sam Abell